Amsterdam

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I want to do justice to Amsterdam and I know I can't even come close. Luckily, there are lots of folks out there who love Ian McEwan's writing and know how deep he delves into his characters. So you already know how flawless his prose is, how masterful his internal landscapes.

Amsterdam is more of the best of McEwan -- every character is so perfectly fleshed out that their every action, however bizarre, makes sense in the context of their perspective. And because this is McEwan, after all, we will have characters acting bizarrely.

Four men who loved Molly Lane meet each other again at her funeral, most with mutual dislike. The implications of Molly's death and her ongoing hold on these men bring about an extended run of cause-and-effect. Dominoes. Once begun, inevitable.

Though this might sound a bit dour, the book surprised me with its humor. What these men really think of each other -- and of themselves -- is enough to crack me up. The pages kept turning as the situation got more and more absurd.

The end reveals the extent of all their self-deception in typical McEwan brilliance.

More things to love:

• A tongue-in-cheek inside look at the running of a British tabloid newspaper
• An old-fashioned duel hilariously reinvented for the modern world
• The loveliest and most detailed hallucinations I've ever read

I stand by my assertion that McEwan always reminds me of Virginia Woolf, in style and execution if not storyline. Amsterdam is my favorite of his so far.

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On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan


My rating: 2 of 5 stars

'WONDERFUL... EXQUISITE... DEVASTATING' reads the cover. I'd change that to 'WONDERFULLY STILTED... EXQUISITELY REPRESSED... DEVASTATINGLY STUPID'.

Not the author, of course. He is, as always, master of the internal lives of characters. Ian McEwan's writing is best upon first encounter. His writing is gorgeous, painful, sensuous and breathtaking. I've always thought of him as rather Woolfian.

His incisive style, however, is not improved with the addition of PLOT. On the contrary, the plot ruins the book.

I'm left wondering if the characters really were products of their time, or if they were just supremely stupid specimens.

On the bright side, we can add it to the pile of persuasive arguments for why two virgins should never marry.

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